By Robert Cleveland
Contributor Robert Cleveland is the IT Director for a document management services company. When he isn't working on computers and scanners, he's spending time with his wife and kids, or...

Robert Cleveland
Contributor Robert Cleveland is the IT Director for a document management services company. When he isn't...

Author Sponsor

The eventual goal is not to encourage diversity of opinion, but to stifle dissenting viewpoints.

This author Hatred And Control

Robert Cleveland
Contributor Robert Cleveland is the IT Director for a document management services company. When he isn't...

Author Sponsor

The eventual goal is not to encourage diversity of opinion, but to stifle dissenting viewpoints.

This author Hatred And Control

Robert Cleveland
Contributor Robert Cleveland is the IT Director for a document management services company. When he isn't...

Author Sponsor

The eventual goal is not to encourage diversity of opinion, but to stifle dissenting viewpoints.

This author Hatred And Control

Sarah Palin
Sarah Louise Palin, born February 11, 1964, is an American politician, commentator and author. As the Republican Party nominee for Vice President in the 2008 presidential election, she was the first Alaskan on the national ticket of a major party and first Republican woman nominated for the vice presidency. | Photo: Archives | Sarah Palin, Republican, Alaska, Presidential Election,

Winning The Debate With Lies
Published on April 24, 2013

The past week has been truly remarkable: starting out with an unspeakable tragedy, ending with a tense manhunt and the eventual killing of one terrorist, and capture of another.

In the midst of all of this, we were, yet again, treated to the same bogus theories, thrown out carelessly, flippantly from those left-wing pundits who sing the same tune each and every time tragedy strikes in America. Because it was April 15, and the attack occurred in Boston, it had to be the Tea Party, they said. They were almost salivating, so eager were they to finally, finally see their hopes and dreams for the conservative movement come to pass.

As we all know, the modern Tea Party movement has a long, sordid history of violence and terrorism - since its inception just a few short years ago, we have seen them perpetrating, or attempting to perpetrate numerous acts of terrorism, including one Tea Party member who attempted to detonate a bomb on a passenger plane that he had smuggled on board in his underwear, another who attempted to detonate a car bomb in Times Square, a man who flew a small plane into an IRS office in Houston, another man who, spurred on by the hateful vitriol contained in a graphic on Sarah Palin's website, attempted to assassinate former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and yet another man who walked into a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado and opened fire...and all of this is in addition to the Boston Marathon bombing.

Or, at least this is how history would be written if any of the progressive media's beliefs and predictions about the Tea Party, conservatives, or the Republican Party had any shred of truth.

So deep is their hatred for the conservative movement, so dire are their assumptions, that even a movement that arose strictly to oppose the billions upon billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse cannot exist without constantly being accused of some of the most heinous acts of terrorism and murder our nation has ever seen - and yet despite the fact that they throw out these accusations time and time again, and are proven wrong by the facts time and time again, they persist with their lies and their hatred, hoping against hope that just that one time their hatred and their assumptions will be vindicated, allowing them to forevermore win every argument and every debate because, after all, they were right, and those nasty, racist hateful conservatives are violent terrorists, after all.

And yet, what can they point to when it comes to actual conservative terrorism? In very recent history, there is nothing to point to - Timothy McVeigh, maybe, though his actions far predated the modern Tea Party movement, and were roundly denounced by Americans across the political spectrum. Abortion clinic bombings, or the targeting of abortion doctors that occurred some time ago and then dried up, were never linked to any larger Christian or pro-life conspiracy, yet they are still some who point to those incidents as evidence that American Christians are violent.

There have been numerous examples in recent years of the Department of Homeland Security targeting Americans with conservative viewpoints for suspicion as potential domestic terrorists, yet in cases such as the Fort Hood shooting, and even the Boston Marathon bombing, authorities in the US ignored repeated warnings about the perpetrators of the attacks. Maybe if the Obama administration had been looking for Islamic radicals, who have been committing terrorist acts across the globe for decades, instead of focusing on their political enemies, this attack could have been prevented...but that is impossible to say for sure.

But one thing is definite: now that the affiliations and motives of the terrorists are known, they are completely irrelevant to the conversation. It's a bit reminiscent of how major media figures dealt with Christopher Dorner's political beliefs: once it came out that he was a big fan of the progressive politicians and media figures, his manifesto was edited, and those aspects of his personality were conveniently excluded from reports coming from the mainstream media. It also brings back memories of the Family Research Council shooter. What? You don't know about the left-wing wacko who attempted to commit mass murder at the FRC? Reading the story was like reading a play-by-play of leftists' accusations against Sarah Palin after the Giffords shooting: in the aftermath of the huge protests against Chick-fil-A for their support of organizations that advocate for traditional marriage, a hate-filled left-wing radical took a "hate map" from the Southern Poverty Law Center's website (and it was, literally, labeled as a "hate map," pointing out the specific locations of organizations the SPLC deemed to be hate groups), and plotted to commit mass murder at several of the organizations targeted on the SPLC's map. Thankfully, he was stopped at the Family Research Council's offices - the first of many stops on his planned route. He had even brought along several Chick-fil-A sandwiches, which he planned to rub in the faces of his victims.

But progressives in politics and the mainstream media didn't want that information to be widely known, so they conveniently ignored it...just like it nearly took an act of God to bring the Gosnell trial to the national media's attention - because the horrendously gruesome facts of that case just didn't fit the media's narrative on abortion.

It seems that the mantra of the New York Times: "All the news that's fit to print" has been taken to an extreme by today's media - they can spread lies and dispersions about those they disagree with politically with no consequences...and they will do it over and over again, expressing their hatred through false accusations, hoping against hope that just one time, they will be right, and forever win their every political debate because they will have all new smear tactics available.

This is the eventual goal: to shut down the opposition; not to bring out a diversity of opinion, but to stifle dissenting viewpoints. The very idea that this kind of vile hatred is spread through lies and false accusations time and time again is repulsive, and should not be tolerated. These attempts to control the national debate through the spread of lies and hatred should not be allowed to continue.

Hatred And Control: Details

"Hatred And Control" was first released on 4.24.2013 and last updated on 10.17.2018 6:54 AM EDT.
Robert Cleveland submitted this feature to AND Magazine.
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